Rural Life and Industrialization

The region known as the ‘west’ comprises a minority of the population of the globe. The west influences global trends and determines national agendas disproportionately. China and India comprise vaster quantities of human souls than the west. Chinese and Indian individual identities are shaped by western trends and ways of thought. Resulting contradictions in the values of these peoples provide a telling study. A western conception of the individual proves efficacious to agendas of western businesses and the commodification of value. Traditional values emphasize family authority, moral virtue, public reputation, and social solidarity. In wisdom rural values see dignity, and in respect they see merit, in hospitality honor, in discipline virtue, and in public engagement social responsibility. Materialism infiltrates developing societies, rural life, cultural norms, and is reinforced by a seducing power to undo the fabric of social cohesion. Men seduced by prospects of ‘self-made’ success abandon families in pursuit of daring and romanticized exploits for material prosperity. Insecurity nurtured by images in advertising create fear of inferiority. Competitiveness fills the void. Familial loyalty is not worth the opportunity cost in the face of impending failure to compete. Women objectify themselves for the sexual satisfaction of suitors. Energy and effort wasted on vain pursuits replace a woman’s natural confidence with conceptions of self-worth that are conditional on submission to consumer industry. Instead of submission of each woman to her husband (a condition deplorable in the past), the modern age has seen the rise in submission of millions to a handful of oligarchs who deem what clothing and body habitus is considered attractive. Aesthetic values are conditioned over time with exposure to certain kinds of images since childhood. Elders unwittingly resist the inevitable proliferation of technology as a highly visible culprit enabling the genocide of their cultural values. Rural communities, where the majority of earth’s inhabitants are housed, lose their cohesion with the upsurge in individualistic desires for consumption and self-advancement. Hysteria follows paranoia with the conception that multitudes are competing for relative self-worth . Psychological manipulation on a mass scale has been linked to patterns of competitive behaviours in the absence of any objective need for certain commodified imports. Insecurity undermines the essential equality of all human beings. Individuals pursue their new conception of self-worth where family unity, social solidarty, and collective prosperity cannot follow. Competition for social fitness where an individual wins versus multitudes of outcompeted misfits, who lose, borrowed from biological evolution, is adopted and popularized as a conception of social reality. Inequality is both the result and motivation of competition. Erosion of rural solidarity is isolated from centers of discourse and policy. Nuclear family unity is relegated to a romantic and outdated past. Youth are the victims of this in the short-term. Posterity struggles with the challenges these deranged generations will create in the long-term.